ABSTRACT
The African Union (AU) led the political and military response to the crisis in Darfur.1 Despite the fact that the crimes committed in Darfur amounted to violations of the scale required to invoke the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) principle, the United Nations (UN) Security Council did not act with resolve.2 This remained the case even after the UN system’s Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said Darfur was among the world’s worst humanitarian crises.3 The contributions and the limitations of the AU’s response to the Darfur crisis afford the necessary terrain to discuss one of the central questions tackled in this collection: What is the locus of the international responsibility to protect if we agree that the Government of Sudan (GoS) was unable or unwilling to protect its population? And what are the advantages and limitations of regional organizations – specifically the AU – in responding to such challenges?
